TERAFAB is the chip fab SpaceX and Tesla announced near Tesla’s Austin gigafactory to fabricate 2-nm chips in two flavors, edge silicon for robotaxis and Optimus robots and high-power chips for SpaceX and xAI, with a recursive design loop keeping masks, fabrication, testing and iteration in one building (site). It enters the corpus with the terawatt-a-year announcement, 80% of whose output is intended for space, and is sized the next day at a billion chips a year at a kilowatt each on thousands of acres and more than 10 GW. Intel joined the consortium in April, and by August the project, then projected to cost up to $119 billion, is the hardware set beside a DeepMind executive’s remark that recursive self-improvement is what justifies the capex.
The October 5 edition reported TSMC exploring help operating these fabs. The October 9 edition reports Musk ruling out a TSMC operating role. This is a change in reported plans, not a change in independently verified operations.